Red Star over China (79 page)

together with that of P'eng Chen, Liu Shao-ch'i, Lo Jui-ch'ing, and others.

Yao I-lin
(p. 419) was, as Minister of Commerce, the youngest member of the State Council. Born in Anhui in 1916, the son of a bankrupt bourgeois family which lived (he said) by periodically “selling some article,” he had his secondary education in Shanghai and Peking. He then enrolled in Tsing Hua University but left during his second year (1935) to devote full time to revolutionary activity.

When the author met Yao in 1935, he was a student leader working closely with Huang Ching and Huang Hua. Soon after Japan's seizure of Peking in 1937 he joined them in organizing guerrilla warfare in the countryside, working under the CCP CC North China Bureau, headed by Liu Shao-ch'i. Yao I-lin had no special training in commerce but learned, during his guerrilla days, how to manage a wartime economy. In 1950 he attended a cadres' school for trade, and in 1952 became vice-minister of commerce. As the official mainly responsible for the functioning of the rice-rationing system during the critical years 1959–61 he made a record of outstanding achievement. In 1960, aged forty-four, he was promoted to full minister of the Commerce Department.

Yeh Chien-ying
(p. 70n) became one of the ten marshals of the PLA and in 1966 was named one of “the group leading the cultural revolution under the CC” and a member of the CC military affairs committee. That combination of roles reflected an early period when, already a general, Yeh studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow (1928) and the following year “learned about drama in Germany and France.”

Born in Kwangtung in 1897, in a merchant family, Yeh graduated from Yunnan Military Academy, became a district magistrate in Kwangtung, joined the KMT in 1922 and became an instructor at Whampoa Military Academy in 1923. In 1924 he joined the CCP. He commanded a division during the Northern Expedition. After participating in the abortive Nanchang and Canton uprisings he spent two years in Russia and Europe. After he returned to China in 1930 his Party history became closely identified with Chou En-lai. For a time he also headed a drama school in Soviet Kiangsi.

Yeh was on the revolutionary military council m 1934 when Chou En-lai replaced Chu Teh as its chairman and both Mao and Chu Teh were in opposition. Chou and Yeh planned, with Li Teh, the retreat which developed into the Long March. After the historic meeting at Tsunyi (1935), where Mao assumed Party PB leadership, Yeh backed Mao against Chang Kuo-t'ao at Maoerhkai. During the Resistance War he became (with Chou En-lai) a principal military liaison person in KMT territory (1938-45), where the author frequently interviewed him (see
RNORC).
He was said to have persuaded sixteen regimental commanders in the Shansi KMT armies to join the Reds. Chief of staff of the PLA in 1946, he was military commander and concurrently mayor of Peking in 1949, and from 1949 to 1955 was military and party chief in South China. He was also a member of the SC of the NPC from 1954 and a vice-chairman
of the National Defense Council from 1962. Yeh was married to Tseng Hsien-chih, a Japanese-educated Hunanese, long a national leader in women's organizations. For an American general's opinion of Yeh as a military leader, see Evans Carlson's
Twin Stars of China
(New York, 1940).

Yeh T'ing
(p. 115), a Whampoa cadet and commander of the Twenty-fourth Division of the Nationalist forces during the Northern Expedition (1926-27), was a principal leader of the Nanchang Uprising on August 1, 1927. After its failure Yeh retreated to Swatow, took part in the CMT's disastrous Canton Uprising in December, 1927, and escaped to Hongkong. He withdrew from politics for a decade. In 1937 Yeh was authorized by Chiang Kai-shek to reorganize surviving Red partisans on the Kiangsi-Fukien-Hunan borders, to create the New Fourth Army. These partisans had formed a rear guard when the main Red Army retreated to the Northwest in 1935, and one of their leaders, Hsiang Ying (Han Ying), became vice-commander of the New Fourth Army. In 1941 Chiang Kai-shek's troops ambushed part of the New Fourth Army, killed Hsiang Ying, and wounded and imprisoned Yeh T'ing. After Yeh's release in 1946 he died, en route to Yenan, in an airplane crash which also killed Teng Fa, Po Ku, and others.

From the inception of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) its constitution provided for the election of delegates to periodic congresses, which chose a supreme or Central Committee (CC). The CC itself decided when congresses should convene, but once a decade was a minimum. The GPCR interfered with plans announced to hold a Ninth Congress in 1966.

Congresses of the CCP have taken place as follows:

Founding Congress, Shanghai, June-July, 1921

2nd, Shanghai, July, 1922

3rd, Canton, June, 1923

4th, Shanghai, January, 1925

5th, Hankow, July, 1927

6th, Moscow, July, 1928

7th, Yenan, April, 1945

8th, Peking, September, 1956

The Seventh CCP Congress (1945) elected forty-four full members to the CC and the Eighth Congress (1956) elected ninety-seven full members and ninety-six alternate members. The CC chooses a Political Bureau (Politburo), the equivalent of a Party cabinet. The Eighth Congress CC elected twenty full members of the Politburo (PB) and six alternate members.

From 1921 to 1935 the CCP followed the pattern of Stalin's Party, in which the General Secretary (of the CC and the PB) held chief responsibility for leadership. The term used in Chinese for “General Secretary” was
Tsung shu-chi.
General secretaryship of the Party was held by the following:

A change in the significance of the title “General Secretary” took place at an enlarged meeting of the PB (including CC members and army commanders) on the Long March at Tsunyi, Kweichow, in January, 1935. At that time Mao Tse-tung won majority control of the PB. The Tsunyi Conference heard and accepted Mao Tse-tung's critique of Po Ku's mistakes, and Po Ku resigned as General Secretary. Mao now held the mandate of the Red Army and the Party to lead them on the Long March. Mao was already Chairman
(Chu-hsi)
of the Central Soviet Government, but the latter had disintegrated. The Tsunyi Conference simply transferred top authority to the Chairman, above the General Secretary. Lo Fu was named new General Secretary, but was subordinated to Mao, who was also named Chairman of the supreme Party revolutionary military committee.

Lo Fu was still General Secretary of the PB when the author visited Pao An in 1936, but Lo Fu referred (in English) to Mao as “leader of the Party.” Mao was
Chu-hsi.
In a conference of the PB held in Lochuan in 1937, Mao was elected
Chu-hsi
of the CC and the PB. Lo Fu's title remained
Tsung shu-chi.
He was still called that when the author again saw Lo Fu in Yenan in September, 1939. The position of General Secretary was formally abolished at the Seventh National Congress of the Party in 1945. Provision was then made for a Chairman and four Vice-Chairmen of the PB to constitute a standing committee. One of the Vice-Chairmen served as a recording secretary
(mi-shu-chang).
In 1956 the Eighth National Congress restored the title “General Secretary,” but the position carried less significance than formerly, although it was a job of top administrative coordination. In 1956 Teng Hsiao-p'ing was chosen General Secretary. In the official order of listing, after the Eighth CC's Eleventh Plenum (August, 1966), Teng still appeared as fifth in rank under Mao Tse-tung—but by 1967 he was under heavy attack, together with Liu Shao-ch'i, from leaders of the GPCR, and it seemed likely that his career had come to an end.

Following is the order of rank of members of the Politburo after the tenth plenary session of the Central Committee of the Eighth Congress of the CCP in 1962, and after the eleventh plenary session in August, 1966, together with notations of official and unofficial action for or against them:

Beyond listing a few works directly related to the principal historical context of this volume, it would seem redundant to offer a general bibliography on China when so many already exist.

Primary sources on the 1921–37 period were virtually nonexistent when this book was written. Much has since been added by the work of foreign scholarship and research as well as by publications released in Peking. An early and basic bibliography of works in Chinese, Japanese, and European languages appeared in Benjamin Schwartz's
Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao.
John Rue's
Mao Tse-tung in Opposition
contributed some new sources, in 1966, as did Jerome Ch'en's
Mao and the Chinese Revolution
(1965), and Stuart Schram's biography a year later.
The Chinese Communist Movement, 1921–27
(Stanford, 1960) and
The Chinese Communist Movement, 1937–49
(Stanford, 1962) are bibliographies of materials in various languages prepared by Chun-tu Hsueh. Allan B. Cole compiled another guide to some basic literature in English in his
Forty Years of Chinese Communism,
published by the American Historical Association (Washington, D.C., 1962).

Bibliographical notes compiled by Howard L. Boorman appear at the end of his essay, “Mao Tse-tung: The Lacquered Image,”
China Quarterly
(London, Oct.-Dec., 1963). The latter periodical contains many articles of special interest to students of the pre-1949 period of the Chinese revolution, as well as analyses of current information. In Paris the
Cahiers Franco-chinois
serves a valuable purpose. There are, of course, abundant Russian historical works of which no listing is attempted here.

I. American and European Book on Early Phases of the Chinese Communist Revolution

B
ERTRAM
, J
AMES,
First Act in China,
New York, 1938. An eyewitness account of the Sian Incident.

B
RANDT
, C
ONRAD,
Stalin's Failure in China,
Cambridge, Mass., 1958.

_____ Benjamin Schwartz, and John K. Fairbank, A
Documentary History of Chinese Communism,
Cambridge, Mass., 1952.

B
UCK
, J. L
OSSING,
Land Utilization in China,
Chicago, 1937. Dr. Buck seriously contradicts some of the Communists' claims regarding the extent of tenancy.

C
ARLSON
, E
VANS
F
ORDYCE,
Twin Stars of China,
New York, 1940. Interesting first-hand impressions of Chinese Communist leaders in 1937–38 by the only American general who applied Communist guerrilla tactics in the training of American troops—“Carlson's Raiders” of World War II. His China reports were read by President Roosevelt.

C
HEN
H
AN-SENG,
Landlord and Peasant in China,
New York, 1936. A Harvard graduate who lived in exile before the revolution, Dr. Chen made reports on Chinese agrarian problems which influenced many scholars in China and abroad. He was in 1966 a specialist in Peking's Institute of International Affairs.

C
H'EN
, J
EROME,
Mao and the Chinese Revolution,
London, 1965.

C
HIANG
K
AI-SHEK,
Soviet Russia in China,
New York, 1957. The Generalissimo gives his estimation of the strategic factors that favored his Communist adversaries in China.

C
HIANG
K
AI-SHEK
, M
ME
. (S
OONG
M
EI-LING),
General Chiang Kai-shek: The Account of the Fortnight in Sian
... (original title:
Sian: A Coup d'Etat),
New York, 1937. A popular version of the Incident, with extracts from the Generalissimo's diary.

C
HOW
T
SE-TUNG,
The May Fourth Movement,
Cambridge, Mass., 1960. A Chinese scholar traces the causes and the consequences of the cultural renaissance period, which Mao Tse-tung defines as the beginning of modern revolutionary China.

C
LUBB
, O. E
DMUND,
Twentieth Century China,
New York, 1964.

C
OMPTON
, B
OYD,
Mao's China, Party Reform Documents,
1942-44, Seattle, 1952. Important for several of Mao's texts which appear only in bowdlerized form in his
Selected Works.